Des enfants dans Séoul, ou le spectre de la ville dans les albums coréens

Abstract

“The City and the Child” is a topic that captures attention when the town takes shape with the vastness, volume, density, and dynamism attributed to the Korean capital, particularly since its significant redevelopment projects in the late 1980s. These projects have led to urban developments in Seoul in the 1990s that have positioned it as a “reflection of growth”. But where are the children in this megacity? Are they even there? What place does Seoul reserve for them? What do they see of this “mirror of growth”? Considering the urban form is inseparable from the uses they can make of it, we can also wonder what uses they have made of the city during these decades of hyperurbanization, which have been a period of transformation, and subsequently, when it has lost momentum. And, most importantly, how are these issues addressed and represented in Korean children’s picture books? Based on a corpus consisting of around fifteen titles and approached through a semiotic analysis based on descriptive semantic and visual isotopies, we will examine the characteristics of the city depicted, the representations given, and the uses that children of these books make of it based on the activities they engage in and the spaces they frequent. Thus, the object “city” shaped by Korean children’s books published since the 1990s will be revealed.

Keywords

• fiction
• iconotext
• cultural representation
• hyperurbanization
• mutation
• density